The Huerta Valenciana is a unique cultural landscape of fields and plantations. For generations this region, mainly planted with perennially rotating crops of tigernuts, artichokes and onions, was regarded as the vegetable garden of Spain. “Camagroga” is a filmic elegy about peasant pride and how it is inscribed in the physiognomies, gestures and postures of the people behind these agricultural products.

Tardor, as autumn is called in the Valencian regional language, is the season when the tigernut straw is burned on the fields to make the winter harvest of the nut-sized bulbs easier. Antonio Ramon and his daughter Inma run a farm of just under four hectares north of Valencia – hardly a profitable size nowadays. And yet they apply a surfeit of care and traditional knowledge to their products, seemingly following the impulses of their vegetative nerve system rather than a deliberate programme. Ever since their fields were also identified as prime real estate in the development plan of the expanding provincial capital, however, they have known that the battle zone has already reached their barn door.

The earth never sleeps. The duo Semiconductor distils research data on earth movements and animates them in a five-channel installation. In a dark hall, visitors to the Sónar Barcelona 2016 festival are captivated by a huge, luminous band of ceaselessly morphing layers of colours and strange sounds, experiencing a cut through both landscape and time.

Geologically, layers of earth form over thousands of years. The processes are almost imperceptible to humans. A research project in a Spanish quarry reconstructs earth movements, models them and records them acoustically. Creaking, rumbling and trickling, the layers leave traces of sounds animated in an audiovisual five-channel installation by the duo Semiconductor.

Thoughts, sometimes just numbers, reach us from offscreen almost like music, like a mantra or a prayer. What we see are circular fragments from familiar spaces: a mirror, a magnifying glass. A day like any other day: without medication, or perhaps better with? A film like the investigation of an uncertainty principle: do we really see better with a magnifying glass? A face scratched out of the family album: the gap is draped with flowers and cut-out pictures of clothes and finally filled again by a drawing.

In the blink of an eye – as the film is titled – 66 years pass by, seven centuries of stone crumble and a savings bank replaces a church. In six and two half chapters, Jorge Moneo Quintana succeeds in a feat of archival work, montage and sound design. The organic merging of images that show the site’s transformation submerge the audience into a pleasantly sober reflection on the beauty and sadness of decay.

Some light relief in the form of a snappy dance number! In colourful rotoscoping, in movement sequences drawn frame by frame, the figures whirl across the screen. Students of the TecnoCampus in Mataró near Barcelona created this short film as a joint project. One can see the fun they had in the process in every scene. Let’s just join the dance!

Madrid 2020 seen from over a hundred years ago. A “Psycho-Sociological Study with Drawings and Photographs from Real Life” from 1901 sheds light on the various kinds of “lowlifes”: Criminals, parasites, outcasts and homosexuals populate the city. Both humorously and critically, the film examines the architecture, social structure and categories of outsiderdom. The result is a playful praise of disobedience.

Enza, in her early twenties, is a singer and seeker studying the rhythms of life in Salento. She breathes music, collects old folksongs and thus connects the people, the present and the past. Rooted in Tarantism and in the tradition of the healers she uses singing as a means to fight alienation. Her portrait is a cinematic legacy vibrating with intensity. It reveals the thin line walked by those who refuse to be satisfied with relative freedom.

As a happily married manager of a department store, everything in the protagonist’s life is peaceful and orderly. But on his customary walk through the park one Sunday, he is suddenly confused by a sign marked with just one word: “Park”. The disturbance is so great that his everyday routine is thrown into chaos. Freely adapted from a story by Arthur Schnitzler.

Ricky is a boy from the Ashéninka tribe who lives with his family deep in the Peruvian Amazon Forest. But even here, the children’s favourite pastime is watching videos on their mobile phones. One day, Ricky is faced with the task of overcoming his fears and going hunting for a huge catfish that can only be caught by hook. This is where his journey to adulthood begins.

The day begins for father and daughter. They climb beyond their treehouse, glide over and under water, cross blooming landscapes, travel through the air and fly on into space. By ship, bicycle, balloon or on foot. A film about travelling, collecting souvenirs in passing and the question of what’s left at the end of a life.

Nazario, founder of the Spanish underground comics movement and pioneer of the gay graphic novel, looks back on his eventful life, his flamboyant and explicit works. 16mm films, photos, illustrations and paintings document the spirit of departure of a counter culture, but also recount Nazario’s great love for Alejandro with whom he was together until the latter’s death. Profession and passion merge in this artist.

It has been said that the baroque artist Diego Velázquez didn’t paint figures, but the air and light between them. And one could say about this film that it is not Velázquez’s larger-than-life painting “Las Meninas” that is the subject, but the penetrating gaze with which it looks back at his viewers. Among the many clever minds that discuss the artist and the intricate structure of this painting’s composition, it is curiosity itself that somnambulates here.

“Paintings aren’t movies, they’re paintings”, insists art critic and historian Svetlana Alpers. She’s right, of course – and then again, she isn’t. She’s one of the renowned talking heads interrogated by director Andrés Sanz Vicente to solve a crime. But who or what actually died? Perhaps our ability to see, as Alpers claims? For around 400 years, Diego Velázquez’ painting has been exposed to the eyes of its public, the analyses of its scientifically advanced critics who have racked their brains over who on the canvas enters through which door and why. “The Painting” is a continuation of this painting-eye-encounter with the means of cinema. The air and the light between the concrete thing and its passionately glowing aura are captured. In this, but only in this, a painting can be a movie after all.

Covid-19 has made quarantine and self-isolation the everyday experience for many. This project, developed at the CPH:LAB, invites people to scan their most personal places and moments. The resulting VR experience is a walk-in archive and time capsule, the collective memory of a state of emergency which also preserves forgotten virtues like deceleration and the spirit of discovery.